Techological Farming

Let’s choose technologies that enhance our ability to care for the Earth, for one another and for the future

It seems to me that humanity’s love affair with technological innovations is insatiable.

The basic human impulse toward toolmaking seems innocent enough when you think about how the earliest humans had to survive upon their ejection from the Garden. For a creature with no claws or fangs, a sharp stick sure would be useful for family defense and for spearing a rampaging aurochs. That same aurochs would taste a lot better and be more nutritious when seared crispy on the outside, rare to medium on the inside, over the technology of fire.

The point of the sharpened stick would be harder and would penetrate a tough bull hide more easily if it were fire-hardened — better yet if a sharp stone were attached to it. The stick could be thrown further, providing safety to the hunter, if it were thrown with an atlatl, and more effective still if launched from a bow with a string.

It’s really difficult to argue that the stick, the fire, the spearpoint, the bow, and the string were technological innovations that were neither necessary nor useful. Tools aside, many historians argue that the single most significant human technology is language. Language allows us to make our thoughts and feelings known to others using commonly agreed upon sounds and gestures. Language is what enabled Cain’s descendent Imhotep to engineer the first known step pyramid in Saqqara, Egypt. When humanity used technology in the spirit of arrogance in order to set themselves up as the “rulers of the universe,” their whole system fell apart. Their language became scrambled, and they had to scatter and start again. There is wisdom to be found in that story as it relates to technology.

What does any of this have to do with ecological agriculture?

Since the dawn of time, and for most of its history, this planet has been operating all by itself, without human intervention. Its barren surface through the eons has come to be covered with a thin film of life. Lichens have colonized exposed bedrock, their dead bodies have been decomposed by other life forms, and the increasingly fertile site has been colonized by even more life: mosses, grasses, forbs, grazing animals (micro to macroscopic), trees, shrubs, vines, flowers, fruits, nuts, berries, seeds, etc.

These natural processes and relationships have created the soil and is what has caused that soil to become fertile. Radiant energy from the sun is captured and stored through photosynthesis and creates an incremental surplus year after year. The origins of our economy are ecological. Natural systems have been able to survive, thrive and reproduce in the face of droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions, global warmings, asteroid impacts and ice ages. Not one of these processes depends upon human beings and our cute little toys. This planet is the physical manifestation, in time, of AI: Actual Intelligence.

Somehow, though, the dominant economic and political system on our planet is now addicted to technology. We have become trapped into believing that technology will solve all our problems. When that same technology appears to cause even more problems than it solved, the answer is to be found in new technology! Older tools and technology that worked quite well are re-designed and “improved” not because they don’t work, but because the economic and political system we live within demands it.

The relentless pursuit of technological “improvement” is short-sighted, reductionist, environmentally destructive and unjust. The non-stop search for technological saviors is the very same culture that has created the type of agriculture that has led to the destruction of nearly 50 percent of the planet’s natural habitats. It seems hellbent on eradicating every single weed, bird, bee and butterfly that might even appear to be harmful to crops.

The digging stick allowed our ancestors to artificially increase the amount of crops grown in a particular area, as has the plow, the disc-harrow, chemical fertilizers, fungicides and herbicides. As farmers and ranchers, we are able to produce quantities of foodstuffs that our great-grandparents would not believe. How do we change the course of our agricultural technology so that the whole pyramid doesn’t come crashing down around us, confounding our language and scattering us to the winds?

I am not a complete Luddite, advocating that we destroy technology in order to throw off our economic chains. I don’t want to throw too many wooden shoes or monkey-wrenches into the agricultural machine quite yet. We’re going to have to use some sort of technology to get us out of the mess we have created.

From this point onward, it is our job as ecological farmers to make wise decisions about which technologies we adopt. It is in our best interests to consider a more holistic perspective: Will this tool or technology help me to improve the natural resource base upon which my personal, family and community life depends? Will this tool or technology help to create harmony within my family and community? Will it create an economic burden that will be impossible to pay off?

One of the reasons I chose to be certified organic nearly 30 years ago was to reduce my costs. Profitability occurs when one’s income is greater than one’s expenses. Too many times I’ve consulted with farmers who have invested in tools and technology that they think they need, when really all that has happened is that they have been overcome by Sparkly Object Syndrome.

Let’s use my grandfather as an example. Nearly a century ago, he was convinced that he needed to buy a tractor — the Sparkly Object of his day. He had to borrow money to get it. He was able to grow more crops and thus needed more storage, so he borrowed again. When yields went down, he bought fertilizers and the tools to apply them, along with herbicides for the weeds. Next came the three blue silos and more tractors, all of which was never paid off until his life insurance settlement went to pay the debts instead of supporting the family. It has taken three generations to escape the economic hardship it caused. It remains to be seen if the inner landscape of thoughts, feelings and opinions that were formed in those grim years will ever heal.

In his classic 1949 non-fiction work A Sand County Almanac , ecologist and forester Aldo Leopold wrote, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” The living Earth itself, its forests and prairies, deserts and tundra, is our common home. Our technological choices and our uses of those technologies can either help living ecosystems or destroy them — the permaculture principle of “earth care.” Technology can be used to replace human beings, eliminating the opportunities for creative, interactive engagement with the natural world, or the opposite — this is the permaculture principle of “people care.”

Most Americans are functionally separate from the natural world already — their work-life, where they get their food, how they transport themselves to go to work or get the food, where food is sold and how it is processed and on and on. How can we employ technology to reconnect our children and grandchildren with the natural world and the processes that support a good life (the permaculture principle of “future care”)?

Let us be wise as serpents in our technological choices, and let’s choose technologies that enhance our ability to care for the Earth, to care for other people and to create a beautiful, naturally productive planet for a healthy, productive future.

Mark Shepard is a land designer and consultant and is the author of Restoration Agriculture , Water for Any Farm and the Water for Any Farm Technical Manual .